Is God a Mushroom?

In his 1970 book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John Marco Allegro proposed a wild theory: The story of Jesus was an elaborate allegory for the use of psychedelic mushrooms. Allegro’s thesis was widely rejected, but his ideas reflect a broader interest in the role of psychedelics in spiritual experiences. Today, there is growing archaeological evidence that the use of mind-altering substances must have played a role in the evolution of human spirituality—a “lost history of drugs,” writes John Last, “that shows many centuries of psychedelics’ continuous use, even well into the Christian era.” Last’s essay at The Long Now Foundation is foodfungi for thought.

As late as the fourth century, writers like Proclus and Plutarch were describing the existence of psychedelic sacraments around the ancient world. Egyptian priests were known to use eye ointments that engendered visions of the god Helios Mithras, and burned a psychoactive incense called kuphi that heightened their visionary powers. “It brightens the imaginative faculty [that is] susceptible to dreams, like a mirror,” Plutarch wrote. At pagan burial sites in Spain from roughly the same period, pottery remains show participants drank beer spiked with hallucinogenic nightshades, famous for inducing hell-like visions of the underworld. 

That has given rise to a controversial thesis that our capacity for religious sentiment may actually derive from our habitual use of drugs. After all, our species began as forest-floor foragers, in regions where psychedelic mushrooms grew plentifully in the dung of the very cattle they later domesticated. Like many other animals, we also seem to possess what the psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel calls an “intoxication drive” — an impulse to seek inebriation in order to alter or expand our consciousness, equal to “the basic drives of hunger, thirst, or sex.” “Drug-induced alteration of consciousness preceded the origin of humans,” psychedelics researcher Giorgio Samorini writes. “It is an impulse that manifests itself in human society without distinction of race or culture; it is completely cross-cultural.”